Introduction

A few weeks ago, I ran my first pilot study on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk).

Essentially, MTurk is a platform that you can use to label data and get participants for studies (using money). There is of course more that can be done here, but from my current understanding, these seem to be the two main uses in academia.

The completion of a survey usually takes the following form:

A worker / participant on MTurk accepts the work and is presented a link to the survey.

The worker copies his unique, anonymized workerID into the survey (so that you can reference the data)

The worker completes the survey and is presented a unique random code at the end

The worker copies the code into a form on MTurk’s website.

You match the IDs of workers that completed the survey with IDs in your database and reward workers for their time

You used MTurk before? This sounds familiar? Yes – however, two parts in this chain are rather weak: (1) the manual copying of the workerID and (2) the generation, matching, and copying of the random code at the end. If either of these fails, you have to work out manually if a worker has participated or not.

Principle

As you have already guessed, there is a better way to do this (why else would I be writing about this? :D). MTurk offers to host a so called ExternalQuestion, which allows you to embed a custom website via an <iframe>. On top, it passes some meta information, such as the workerID, to the website; all you need to do is read that info and use the value as you see fit. Additionally, it allows the website to submit a form back to MTurk as proof of having completed the work, which we will do at the end of the survey.

In short, we integrate the survey directly into MTurk thereby getting rid of above pitfalls. It roughly follows these steps:

Create the Survey on the survey tool (in this case Questback)

Create a small adapter website on GitHub (may not be needed if you have a different survey tool)

this will accept and forward requests from Mturk

allow you to create an arbitrary preview of the survey

pipe the form back to MTurk when the survey is finished

Add URL parameters to the survey

forward people to the adapter website upon completion

Host an external question pointing to the adapter website on GitHub

Small Adapter Website on GitHub

At first, I tried to link Questback and MTurk directly; then I discovered two limitations making this impossible: (1) Questback only accepts URL parameters named “a=..&b=..&c=..” instead of full variable names, and (2) Questback can not post the results of a form; I could only find forwarding via GET.

Hence, I set up a small website hosted on GitHub to do the plumbing between both websites.

Note: If you are working with the sandbox, you have to change the mturk_url appropriately.

This does 3 things, depending on how it is called:

if the URL contains a parameter called “returnToMTurk” then we assume that the Questback is forwarding to this website via GET. In this case we take the payload (in this case attentionCheckPassed) and forward it to MTurk as a POST request.

if the URL contains ASSIGNMENT_ID_NOT_AVAILABLE it means that the survey is being previewed. In this case we do nothing and show this website, which will act as the preview of the survey (e.g. display a screenshot of the hit or some other, relevant information to inform people what this task is about). Note that you want to avoid people submitting your survey at this stage, so showing them the raw survey may be counterproductive at this stage.

Otherwise the website is called from MTurk by a worker who wants to complete the survey; in this case we rename the URL parameters from their actual names into a, b, c, d and forward the request to the Questback survey.

Add URL parameters to the survey

In Questback this can be done in the survey properties > User-defined variables.

As mentioned before, the URL parameters will have names a,b,c, … and can be accessed in the survey tool via #p_0001#, #p_0002#, #p_0003#, … .

Forward People to the GitHub Adapter Upon Completion

This is easily done in the properties section of the final page under Questionnaire editor > Final Page > Properties > Redirect to Survey .

The address should point to the GitHub Adapter and the URL should include three parameters: (1) the assignmentID sent from MTurk, (2)-this is reallyimportant– at least one additional parameter to store in MTurk as the result of the task and (3) the “returnToMTurk” parameter used to tell the adapter what to do. An example of a URL could look like this

Note that the assignmentID is set to #p_0001# which is the the first parameter (“a“) passed to the survey from MTurk. In above example attentionCheckPassed is a variable from the survey which we used to determine if participants payed attention or just mindlessly filled out the survey. This is an aggregate of multiple questions and computed by the survey tool upon completion of the survey. This can later be used to automatically accept / reject / ban workers that have completed the assignment.

It is also important to note that MTurk expects the assignmentID and at least one additional parameter to be send through the form’s POST request. For some reason, the additional parameter is mentioned nowhere in the documentation, but, instead, tacitly assumed.

Additionally, the checkbox next to the phrase Automatically add ospe.php3 to URL and Add return ticket have to be disabled. You would use these if you were forwarding / returning to another ESF survey; this isn’t the case here.

Host an External Question Pointing to the GitHub Adapter

All that is left is to actually host a task on MTurk. In this case an External Question.

Unfortunately, this is currently impossible to do through the web UI. Hence, we have to use the API; I decided to do it in Python by adapting a code snippet that I found on the web. It consists of two files: (1) config.py, which stores the credentials, and (2) create_hit.py which creates the actual hit.

That’s it. Running the code will create a HIT that will point to the website on GitHub, which itself points to our survey. The survey will point back to the GitHub website, which will point back to MTurk, going full circle. Neat!

As always, I hope this is useful to some of you and feel free to drop a comment or reach out to me if you have questions.

For the love of all things good; there is two things I don’t like: (1) unnecessary convoluted setups and (2) redoing work I’ve done earlier. SSL Certificates seem to combine both into one beautifully painful mess.

I once again found myself in the need to generate a throwaway SSL certificate for local development and testing. As I’ve posted earlier there is a way to do that with more or less effort. Since I found myself doing this for the third time now I decided to spice things up a bit, cutting down the time it takes. I’ve created a small docker container that’s sole purpose it is to create a certificate from a given config file. The way it works is:

Create a folder (e.g. ./certs) and place the below config file (named config.cfg) into it.

Modify the config file, adding all the SANs required for this certificate

​docker run –rm -it -v./certs:/certs firefoxmetzger/create_ssl

That’s it. It will drop a `private.key` and `certificate.crt` into the previously created folder. It will also print the properties of the certificate into console so you can make sure the SANs are actually added.

The second problem in this years Code Jam was Trouble Sort. This problem was substantially easier then the first one. At least for the small test.

The idea is that one performs bubble sort with three elements at a time and, if the last element in the triplet bigger then the first, one reverses the entire 3-element sub-list. Pseudo-code for this algorithm was given. The goal of the exercise was to, given a list, sort that list using above strategy and then asserting that it was ordered. If it was one should print “OK” otherwise one should print the index of the (0-indexed) first element of non-increasing order (e.g. [3,9,7] should return 1).

The problem with passing the big test was that lists could have up to `10^8` many elements and above trouble sort implementation has `O(n^2)`. This means using the naive implementation will quickly run into the timeout.

The “trick” is to see that trouble sort is equivalent to splitting the unsorted list into elements with even and odd index, sorting them and then concatenating those sorted lists. Since this sort can use a reasonably fast algorithm (e.g. pythons native one) it can happen in O(n*log(n)) which will be significantly faster and work on the second, big set of tests. (I know this because I read it in the analysis).

The way I got that intuition was thinking about the fact that reversing a three element list is the same as swapping elements i-1 and i+1 . So we swap with a “distance” of two which made me wonder if it would be possible to swap the second and third element in the list in some way. The only swaps that involve the third element are when the “cursor” is at position two and four and that would swap with the first or fifth element respectively which are both uneven numbers. This trend continues for all numbers (even swap with even, odd with odd) and suddenly you begin to see a pattern.

Unfortunately I failed this challenge completely. My logic is correct, however if you look carefully at the last line, you will see that it outputs something like “Case 1:” however it should output “Case #1:”. I spent over 2 hours trying to find the mistake…

Sometimes it’s the small things that catch you. This probably won’t happen to me again … ever.

During last week I’ve learned about a Code Jam hub in our University. The idea is to meet up and participate in the Google Code Jam 2018 . I ended up participating and advancing into the first round, so I thought I’d share my solutions here for anybody interested. (And for me for further reference)

An alien robot is shooting a beam that will destroy all algorithms knowledge (not sure how an algorithm can have knowledge, but lets not get philosophical).

The beam starts with strength of 1 and follows a given sequence of actions (string with two literals “S” and “C”). Whenever it shoots “S” it deals damage equal to it’s current strength and whenever it charges “C” the strength is doubled. The sequence “SCSS” would thus deal 5 damage.

You have a shield that can absorb D damage (humanity needs the D!) and can swap any two adjacent literals in the string. What is the minimal number of swaps to reduce the damage dealt to a number <= D? (If impossible return “IMPOSSIBLE”)

You can understand this problem as a tree search (again! gives you a competitive advantage to know these things). The state is the current string and it’s children are all the new states that result from swapping in different places. For each such state you can calculate the damage. To find the closest node to the root node that has damage <= D a possibility is to use simple breadth first search.

Breaching from my usual style I will post the code first and then talk about it below. This is the pure, unmodified code I submitted during the hub, so it is intentionally left a bit messy. It’s still fairly readable though … It’s python and it’s short.

Note: This will work for “small” sequences and is too inefficient for large ones. The branching factor of the tree is len(sequence)-1 which can be up to 30. I timed out on the second (big) test, because I didn’t optimize this part.

Pure breadth first search on a tree with branching factor >10 is generally not a good idea. As such I’ve implemented the search using a queue rather then choosing a recursive approach. This allows to better scale the code as ideas for run time optimization come in.

By optimization I mean pruning of nodes that are clearly disadvantageous. One example is in line 32 where I keep a dictionary of nodes that have been visited. If I encounter the same state again, I already know a shorter path to it; thus I can safely ignore it. To be honest, I should have done the weeding out directly in get_nodes to reduce constant overhead.

Another optimization, which I didn’t implement, would be to see that this is a convex problem. There is exactly one clear minimum (S[…]SC[…]C) and one clear maximum (C[…]CS[…]S) along the border of the problem and there are no local optima in between. Thus, we can ignore all swaps that increase the damage or keep it constant, i.e. “SS”, “SC”, “CC”, and focus on those that swap “CS” into “SC”. This will severely decrease the branching factor. (Note: We already ignore “SS” and “CC” as part of above optimization)

Another consequence of this is that we can swap the queue type from a FIFO (i.e. breadth first) into a priority queue, sorting by current damage dealt choosing the node with lowest damage as the next node. This is essentially Dijkstra’s algorithm (as we don’t use a heuristic, otherwise it would be A*). It keeps amazing me again and again how easily you can swap between different tree searches by simply changing the queue type.

Applying those three optimizations should cut down search time by enough to cope with the big test. It also gets very close to the other solutions I’ve seen; that is “pass over the string back to front and switch all “CS” into “SC”. Repeat until no change was made for an entire sweep of the string and then output the total number of swaps. My approach is simply more formal and can be applied to other problems more easily.

I’ve been looking at the AlphaGo:Zero network architecture [1] and was searching for existing implementations. I’ve found quite a few (here , here and here) with varying degrees of completeness. The cleanest is probably this one but it depends on Jupyter.

What surprised me was that I couldn’t find one that used Keras’ sequential API. While residual blocks aren’t exactly sequential, from a high level view the architecture itself is; it simply stacks (a lot of) residual blocks. So it should be possible to create something like this, right?

The answer is, of course: Yes, there isn’t much that you can’t do in Python. We are actually using this strategy already. Sequential itself inherits from Layer and, in fact, Container (a class sitting between Sequential and Layer in the inheritance hierarchy) states so itself: A Container is a directed acyclic graph of layers. It is the topological form of a “model”. A Model is simply a Container with added training routines. (source)

It works by defining the residual block as a new Keras layer. Depending on how tightly integrated you want it this can be quite short:

Inside the block we fall back to the functional way of stacking layers. If you want better integration, e.g. model.summary() showing the number of trainable weights, there is additional plumbing. Above just shows the gist . . . (gosh! That pun was bad).

Once that is written, we can use model.add( Residual(32, (3,3) )) as we would any other layer. Nice!

To close with an example, I modified the Keras CNN example on CIFAR10 and replaced the hidden convolutional layers with residual ones. I haven’t optimized performance, but you can see how it works. If you are familiar with the example, you might appreciate how similar it looks.

A while ago I posted an updated version of tensorflow’s how to read TFRecords. Today I want to share another version of this file that was created to show how to further optimize the data pipeline.

Before delving into it let me quickly reflect on TFRecords and Datasets.

TFRecords have long been tensorflow’s recommended input method (though I find that folders with images are usually preferred by people). They are made of Google Protocol Buffers stored on disk in a single file. This is advantageous, because this will store the file in one big chunk on the hard drive, meaning faster reading time on HDDs and (I believe) faster average reading time compared to classical image formats like .jpg when reading actual image data.

The Dataset API on the other hand is the new preferred format of reading data. It comes from the observation that feeding data into TF is the steepest part of the learning curve for beginners. It also unifies all the various existing methods in one approach (aka feed_dict or queues). Finally, it allows us to worry about input on a high(er) level which is always convenient.

Now, let’s get to the meat. The idea is simple: Before the pipeline was

read a single record / example / image

decode the record / example / image

augment the image (not necessary in a MWE, but really important for images)

normalize the image (again some NN wizardry that people assume you “know”)

shuffle the examples

batch them up for training

use the batches for the interesting stuff

Shuffle creates a queue of single examples. This works, but is slower then it could be. If we can write the augmentation and normalization to process batches instead of images we can do this:

read a single example

shuffle the examples

batch them up for training

decode the batch

augment the batch

normalize the batch

use batches for the interesting stuff

As you can see, the trick is to batch them up as soon as possible and then decode / augment in batches. I didn’t dig deeply into this, but for some reason it makes the training A LOT faster.

As part of my teaching duties at Uppsala University I am preparing a lab on the Intel Realsense D415 depth cameras.

In this post I want to show how I’ve set up the SDK in an anaconda 3 virtual environment on my Ubuntu 16.04. The instructions on how to compile from source provided by Intel are pretty good. On Ubuntu that is the required way to go, because the libraries are not provided by Ubuntu’s package manager.

There is an existing CMake project which I could pretty much use as is, however I had to slightly reconfigure it to work with anaconda 3 (matching the python version).

As a first step I needed an anaconda environment. I used python 3.6 and the name IIS_lab (because that happens to be the name of the lab I will teach)

conda create IIS_lab -python=3.6

This creates the Python executable and library that I had to include in CMake to build against the correct python version. I prefer to use the cmake-gui to configure CMake projects. In the section PYTHON there are two variables to be replaced. Here is the location and new value:

Also I had to check the BUILD > BUILD_PYTHON_BINDINGS box. [If unchecked, the PYTHON category might be missing. In this case simply configure the project again after you’ve checked it.]

Once those two values were set, I could generate and then build the project following the Intel instructions (including the kernel patch). Once done there were two files of interest:

The name of latter may differ depending on python version, c-compiler and 64-bit vs 32-bit OS. I had to copy those into anaconda’s virtual environment and rename the latter. For brevity I will call the location <env-path> and it expands to ~/<username>/anaconda3/env/<env-name>.

As you can see, I removed the “.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu” ending. This is because the name of the file defines how the library is imported and the dot character ” . ” has a special meaning in python =) .

That’s it. Now I was be able to use the realsense SDK in my conda environment via

source activate IIS_lab
python
>>> import pyrealsense2 as rs

Please feel free to comment and share this if you think it was helpful.